A look back at the defensive dominance of Dikembe Mutombo and how he used the finger wag to intimidate his opponents to think twice before attacking the rim.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RRohLvr3HQ

Transcription

Dikembe Mutombo and the power of the finger.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I just do this, I left these books sideways, this is going to drive so many of those OCD people nuts. So I'm going to put them up for you real quick. You can imagine all the empty books on the other side, so they'll drag an appraiser and there they go. They're just jumping off the shelf.

I want to tell you a quick story about the Dikembe Mutombo. One of those situations that I haven't thought about in years…and there they go, they're just coming out, the whole bookshelf is gonna come out in a second here is perfect.

So we were I was having a conversation with my friend Brad. And he brought this up, he said, you want to do a video about that?

I haven't thought about that in years and I went back and looked at it. And I thought about the geniuses of the situation. So here's this guy from Congo, gets into the league in the early 90s. The 1990s gets into the NBA, okay, his job is to block and he concerns himself, he is going to be one of the greatest blockers of all time, he is going to block and keep the other team from scoring.

This is for those of you who aren't absolute raving basketball fans, those of you who are going to think this sounds childish the way I'm describing it, but I got to play to the whole crowd here.

So his whole thing is, is to play this up and as he's going about doing this, he comes up with this thing where people try to score on him, he blocks him. And then he goes, No, no, no like this. And it becomes this huge thing. It becomes this taunt, the simplest thing in the world.

It isn't anything major, except that it drives people bonkers. It's a simple little taunt when he's done his job. He's kind of tossing it back on them. He wasn't hurting anybody.

But it drove the league insane, they started fining him for it and trying to get it outlawed throughout the entire league. The commissioner of the NBA kept calling him up and saying please don't do this anymore.

And he was getting so much attention from it. It's the one thing he's known for the most that he's a Hall of Famer. But this is this one little move with his finger is the thing that any interview you see they bring it up everything.

It's been copied not only throughout the NBA.

Okay, so we played until I think in 2009 he it was copied not only throughout the NBA, it's been copied throughout all sorts of people doing this.

And using it as a simple little top taunt and going No, no, no, no, no, no. It's so hilarious that something so simple can drive people so crazy. So how does this tie into business?

How does this tie into everything that we normally talk about? Well, if you look at our last handful of videos, the last two days, we were talking about the Hegelian dialectic, okay.

And how when you do something to get a reaction, then what ends up is something in your favor, no matter what, as long as there is an emotional reaction and there was clearly he absolutely drove people bonkers by moving his finger back and forth.

Just something that simple.

That it's not even what we'd call trash talking like we talked about yesterday. He didn't have to say anything. He would oftentimes do No,